An Al Qaeda Martyr’s Enduring Pitch

Hiding out from American drones in Yemen’s badlands in March 2010, Al Qaeda’s most persuasive English-language recruiter donned a camo jacket and addressed American and European Muslims.

“Today, with the war between Muslims and the West escalating,” Anwar al-Awlaki said in the video, “you cannot count on the message of solidarity you may get from a civic group or a political party, or the word of support you hear from a kind neighbor or a nice co-worker. The West will eventually turn against its Muslim citizens.”

It was an audacious pitch. No matter what you may think, the American-born Mr. Awlaki told Western Muslims, sooner or later your governments and fellow citizens will come after you. So you must join our violent cause.

On Sept. 30, it will be five years since the C.I.A. drone strike in Yemen that killed Mr. Awlaki, the first United States citizen executed without trial on orders of a president since the Civil War. But the Hellfire missile that ended his life promoted him to martyrdom in the eyes of his fans, and his influence has turned up in terrorism case after terrorism case. His videos, forecasting a West in which Muslims would increasingly be denigrated, marginalized and threatened with expulsion or worse, have been viewed by hundreds of thousands.

For years those prognostications fell flat. But had he lived to see it, the last year might have given Mr. Awlaki a belated sense of vindication. In the United States, a major party presidential candidate proposed a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” drawing raucous applause. Outspoken anti-Muslim politicians in Europe have won unprecedented support. In a tragicomic spectacle in France, armed police officers surrounded a Muslim woman in a bathing outfit designed for religious modesty, as if her garb posed some dire threat.

At rallies and on social media in many countries, anxious people cry that Muslims are the enemy, and the number of hate crimes aimed at them has ballooned. “This presidential election has redefined social norms in America,” Hazem Bata, the secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America, said at the group’s convention this month. “Things that were only said behind closed doors one year ago are now said out in the open, on TV, on radio, without any sense of embarrassment.”

The anti-Muslim language, of course, has grown in part from real tragedies. In San Bernardino, Calif., and Orlando, Fla., and in Paris, Brussels and Nice, France, a few people chose to obey Mr. Awlaki’s twisted command, later echoed by the Islamic State, that any Muslim in Europe or America has a duty to carry out attacks at home.

In the United States, jihadist killings in the 15 years since the Sept. 11 attacks remain a rounding error — fewer than 100 killed out of more than 220,000 homicides. But terrorism, a word with roots in the Latin for “to cause to tremble,” gets that name for a reason. By shooting up a nightclub or mowing down people with a truck, ostensibly in the name of Islam, attackers send the message that no one is safe — and that any Muslim may be a threat.

The resulting Islamophobia does the work of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State for them. Rather than draw the circle of opprobrium around a tiny number of violent fanatics, some worried Westerners draw it around the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. Yet if all Muslims are smeared as potential enemies, some become more susceptible to the siren call of Mr. Awlaki and his fellow recruiters.

“Terrorism is a strategy of provocation,” said Bruce Hoffman, director of security studies at Georgetown University. “Al Qaeda and ISIS hope to provoke violence that will deepen the cleavages in our society and encourage the demonization of Muslims. When political leaders denigrate Muslims, terrorist groups can grab hold of that and make use of it.”

In his early career as an American imam, Mr. Awlaki rejected terrorist violence. As a preacher in a big mosque outside Washington, he condemned the Sept. 11 attacks. “We came here to build, not to destroy,” he told his congregation. “We are the bridge between America and one billion Muslims worldwide.”

Later, in the English-language Al Qaeda magazine he oversaw, Inspire, he blamed American policy for his disillusionment. “With the American invasion of Iraq and continued U.S. aggression against Muslims I could not reconcile between living in the U.S. and being a Muslim, and I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding on every other able Muslim,” he wrote.

As I found while researching a book on Mr. Awlaki, that was not the whole story. In 2002, Mr. Awlaki, a married father of three, learned that the F.B.I. knew his biggest secret: that he regularly visited prostitutes in Washington hotels. Fearing ruin, he fled the United States and started down the path that ended with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

He soon stopped speaking of bridge building. By 2003, lecturing to young Muslim fans in London, he told them they should “never, ever trust the kuffar” — non-Muslims. In 2006, in 22 lectures on “The Hereafter,” he cited prophecies about a future apocalyptic battle between Muslims and all others. “Islam will rule the world,” he declared. “Kuffar will be stamped out.” For nonbelievers, he added, the choice will be “either Islam or death.”

Those lectures became favorites of both Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013, and Syed Farook, who along with his wife fatally shot 14 people in San Bernardino last year.

Mr. Awlaki’s jihadist cause requires a clash of civilizations — Western Muslims rejecting their neighbors to rally around a bloody, bigoted and backward version of Islam. So he hoped for Islamophobia run amok, driving fearful Muslims to support a global jihad. Yet despite eruptions of anti-Muslim passions here and there, Mr. Awlaki’s dire predictions seemed delusional.

When Donald J. Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, jihadists were gleeful. The Somali affiliate of Al Qaeda, Al Shabab, created a propaganda video combining Mr. Trump’s statement with Mr. Awlaki’s warnings about the West turning on Muslims. For a group trying to lure Somali-Americans to its ranks, any sign of hostility to Muslims in the United States was a boon.

But the harsh language heard at Trump rallies and on talk radio masks an unexpected trend, said Shibley Telhami, a political scientist at the University of Maryland.

From November to June, a period of terrorist attacks and denunciations of Islam, American views of Islam and Muslims actually improved slightly on average in polling overseen by Mr. Telhami — a mark, he said, of opposition to Mr. Trump. “Trump’s opponents have an interest in offering a counterargument, that Islam and Muslims are not the problem,” he said.

At the same time, Mr. Telhami said, “there’s a noisy minority that has become far more hostile to Islam and Muslims.” That has shaken American Muslims. “It’s a frightening and unpredictable thing for Muslims who have a child in school or worry that they’ll be embarrassed or even harmed on the street,” he said.

Back in 2010, Mr. Awlaki told Western Muslims that “ominous clouds” were gathering and predicted that the United States would become “a land of religious discrimination and concentration camps.” It was hyperbole. But it is worth remembering that for jihadists, it was also a fervent hope.